


Force Bound

by TurtleTotem



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Dark Side weirdness as a metaphor/substitute for sexual abuse, Force Bond (Star Wars), M/M, Prequels time setting, Runaway Jedi!Damen, Sith!Laurent, background Aimeric/Jord (sort of), secondary character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-30 22:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17232293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: Laurent is on an important mission for his Sith master, Darth Regence. Damen, who escaped the restrictions of the Jedi Order only to end up a slave on Tatooine, has no reason to help him. But neither of them can deny that the Force has brought them together for a reason -- even if they can't agree on what that reason is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my Secret Santa gift for [Shanigrim](http://www.shanigrim.tumblr.com)! My soul thrilled to see Star Wars AU on your prompt list, and I've tried to sneak a little bit of fashion stuff in there too, since you like that. I hope you enjoy!

"Darth Glaceis," the Chancellor said, as soon as the Sullustan senator's aide had departed, leaving them alone.

"Yes, my master." It was a subtle shift, to any observer, the change from Chancellor and nephew to Sith Lord and apprentice, but a profound one. Laurent's body language stilled and tightened, his head dropping into a bow almost without thought.

"Walk with me."

Laurent followed the Chancellor—Darth Regence, but that name was seldom spoken—out of his chambers onto the balcony that overlooked the glittering sprawl of Coruscant. For some moments they paced the length of the balcony in silence, both of them stretching out with the Force to check for any listeners, the Chancellor subtly checking the dampeners that would inhibit any technological eavesdropping.

"I trust you see the danger we are in," Darth Regence said at last.

Laurent nodded. The Sullustan senator's aide, one of Regence's most reliable spies, had brought alarming news indeed. An accusation, made by some unknown witness, was brewing against the Chancellor; allegations that he was, in fact, a Lord of the Sith. That the idea had not already been laughed out of the Senate showed that the witness was… compelling.

"Who could bring this allegation and be believed?" Laurent asked.

"I believe I know precisely who." Regence sighed heavily and put a hand on Laurent's shoulder. "Glaceis, you are by far the most promising apprentice I have ever trained. But you were not the first. Before you was a… less disciplined young man, Darth Rift. He rebelled against me, rather than learn and grow, and eventually ran away. To my surprise, he proved talented enough to evade me when I tried to hunt him down, and I gave up the attempt. He alone, I think, would have both means and motive to reveal us to the Senate."

Laurent found himself putting out a hand to catch the balcony rail, distracted from his master's words by a creeping coldness in his belly, a wave of lightheadedness. These spells of faintness had been happening more often, but Laurent was not foolish enough to reveal them to his master. A Sith Lord did not advertise vulnerability, even to his most trusted allies. The physician he'd visited could find nothing wrong with him, and that was even worse; it must be some weakness within Laurent's spirit, something that balked at the high stress of his position and duties. That weakness must be ruthlessly excised.

"Darth Rift," Laurent repeated, pulling himself together and running Regence's words through his mind again. "Is he here on Coruscant, then?"

"No, he would not dare come back here, not without the Senate's explicit support and protection. This initial communication was made from a distance—a very great distance, if I am correct."

"How great?"

"Tatooine."

Laurent searched his memory for charts of the galaxy that made any mention of the planet Tatooine. "The Outer Rim."

"Yes. It will take you some time to get there, and time is of the essence."

Laurent raised his eyebrows, a silent question— _Me?_

Regence nodded as if he'd said it aloud. "Find Rift. End the threat he represents to us. His death," Regence sighed, turning back toward his chambers, "is regrettable, considering his potential. But it is for the best."

***

Laurent had another sinking spell, stronger, as he returned to his rooms to prepare for departure. The nearest lamp jangled as he clutched it, the room spinning. He closed his eyes and forced his breath to remain even and slow, waiting it out. It seemed to last forever— _they're getting longer, I swear they're getting longer—_ and left him weak and shaky even when the room was finally still around him. He threw a robe around his shoulders when he realized his teeth were chattering.

He thought suddenly of Nicaise, in those last awful days before he died, shivering even under piles of blankets in front of a roaring fire. They never knew what was wrong with him, either.

_Ridiculous. You're just overtired. You haven't eaten enough today_. His master had always given him the autonomy of deciding for himself when he slept, what he ate; too often, in the time after his parents and brother died in the Akielon attack, he had forgotten to do those things at all. That was years ago now, but bad habits had lingered.

Feeling steady again—or telling himself he did—Laurent began packing a bag, and split the screen of his datapad between possibilities for booking passage to Tatooine, and information about the planet itself. Flicking through information on its history (disreputable) and its culture (desperate), his finger seemed to stop of its own accord on a particular news item, several years old.

_RUMORS PERSIST; SLAVERY STILL PRACTICED ON OUTER RIM WORLDS._

Slavery. Of course, it was the right and duty of the strong to rule over the weak. Still, Laurent had always harbored a secret and shameful squeamishness about slavery. Surely, even under the harsh philosophy of the Dark Side, every being ought to thrive or fail on its own merits. How many Force-sensitive children were bound and captive, capable of greatness far beyond that of their 'masters' but never able to know their potential, much less achieve it? He might have been one of them, had his family been unfortunate enough to die on Tatooine rather than a civilized world like Vere, where the Chancellor could take charge of him.

_You could find someone there._ The voice in his mind seemed to come from both inside and outside of himself, and he knew from long practice what it was. The Force, whispering guidance. His heart began to pound, fluttering inside his skin. _Find them. Save them. Make them yours._

An apprentice. It would have to be deathly secret, and keeping secrets from Regence was not easy… but if it were easy for a Sith to take his master's place, it would not be the final proof of his strength and worthiness. It was the rightful way of things for the Sith apprentice to outgrow, outpace and overpower his master; both he and Regence knew it. And many times, the first step was for the apprentice to declare himself master to another. A slave rescued from the Outer Rim would be a grateful and thus more loyal apprentice, someone Laurent could train and make use of for many valuable years before they rebelled, perhaps even someone he could surrender to, in time, with dignity and pride.

_Find someone. Save them. Make them yours._

Darth Glaceis booked passage to Tatooine, and was gone before sunrise.


	2. Chapter 2

The slavetraders had brought Damen to Mos Espa because he could no longer fetch a decent price in Mos Eisley or Anchorhead. He had too much of a reputation there, as a slave who would talk back, fight back, and run away if given one quarter of a chance. No one had yet been able to beat the trouble out of him. The last man who had tried—Damen's most recent master—well, the limp might fade eventually, but his face would never look quite right again.

Anyone else like him would probably have been killed by now, sold for meat (illegal even on Tatooine, but practiced nonetheless). Even Damen had had his hands full, this time, convincing those around him that he was worth more credits alive. Subtlety had never been his strong suit, as his Jedi mentors had frequently opined, and _persuading_ was delicate work—especially when you'd only ever been half-trained, and couldn't risk being caught in the attempt. He'd managed it, though, and so here he was, in the slave pens of Mos Espa. A fresh start, of sorts. Perhaps he should consider being more submissive to his next master, give himself a more comfortable life.

Damen felt one corner of his mouth tip up, even thinking of it. No. The Jedi Order couldn't break his spirit, and neither would anyone else. If he died, he died. Better the death of his body than that of his mind and heart; he had decided that long ago.

All the same, he made himself stop pacing the length of the tiny separate pen he'd been placed in—one with increased security measures—and tried to reach for peace through the Force. He'd never been good at meditation. He'd never been good at much of anything the Jedi Order wanted him to be good at, and all too good at things it didn't, but that didn't matter now. The Force was the same here and everywhere. Through it he could feel the great throbbing heartbeat of Mos Espa, the endless churn of desperation and greed, fear and grief and despair, shot through with the bright sparks of love and joy that people still managed to find and carry with them, even in the worst times and places.

This was not the worst time and place for him. He felt suddenly as certain of that as if his own father had sat down beside him and said it aloud. He would be purchased today before the auctions even began, and it would be a great stroke of luck for him. Except, of course, that luck had nothing to do with it.

When Damen opened his eyes, he was looking directly into the eyes of a blond-haired young man.

He was several yards away, in front of another pen, and there were enough people passing between them that the lock of their gazes should have been easy to break. It wasn't. Those people didn't matter. The distance between them didn't matter.

Damen had never felt anything like this. It was from the Force, unquestionably; his whole body was alive with it, hair on end, blood singing in his ears. It wasn't exactly a pleasant sensation, too intense for that, but it couldn't be ignored. And there was no question that the other man—about Damen's own age, richly dressed in some Core-world style—felt it, too. He was staring back at Damen with his lips parted, one hand half-raised toward him.

Damen spared a moment to think that the young man was beautiful, beautiful beyond words, and then wondered if that was true at all, or if it was something inside him that Damen was seeing—something ice-cold and sharp-edged and very dangerous, but still beautiful—

And then the man broke their stare and walked away in the other direction.

Damen almost called out after him, before he remembered himself. Remembered that he was a slave in a pen, with no right to demand that the man return and acknowledge whatever had just happened, that he tell him who he was and why he was here. He rattled the bars of the pen instead, breath coming heavy with anger and thwarted purpose.

_You're supposed to buy me and you know it_. _Come back here and get me!_

Anger was of the Dark Side. So was fear. Both were strong in him right now. For all that his mentors had tried to stamp those emotions out of him, he'd never seen that they hurt anything, so long as he didn't let them control his actions. Nothing and no one had ever been able to control Damen, not even the Force.

 

Damen went onto the auction block an hour later. There was a healthy smattering of interest in him, which eventually came down to a bidding war between a dark-robed Twi'lek, who almost certainly worked for one of the Hutt crime lords, and a shrewd-eyed old human woman in the overblown red silks of the brothel sector.

The auctioneer was happy to let them continue driving each other's bids higher and higher, but the human woman had started to look disgruntled, leaving the Twi'lek to lick his pointed teeth, tasting victory. Damen wondered if he dared try to _persuade_ the woman to keep bidding—he'd rather service the nastiest orifices on Tatooine than be some gangster's muscle, breaking debtors' fingers—

"Four thousand credits."

Every eye in the auction house turned toward the sudden, clear voice, and Damen's heart leapt without even consulting him first. It was the blond man, of course, cool and bored and haloed by sunlight in the doorway.

"Sold," the auctioneer said instantly. Four thousand was twice what the other bidders had been working up to. "You can collect him at the back of the building. Next up we have…"

Damen gave the blond a wink as he was ushered out the back. The blond looked away, cheeks flushing scarlet.

 

"Name?" asked a sleepy, indifferent clerk.

"Laurent," said the blond man. No surname given or asked.

"Sign here," the clerk said. "And here. This is the remote for his chip; there, now it's keyed to your DNA. If you're taking him off-planet, don't forget to disable that thing, or it'll blow up automatically when he leaves Tatooine's orbit."

It wouldn't. Damen had learned the trick of disabling chips with the Force years ago, or he'd have been dead many times over.

"Thank you," Laurent said coolly, tucking the remote in his pocket.

"Thanks for doing business," the clerk said listlessly. "He's all yours."

Suddenly they were alone, in the little courtyard behind the auction house, and the blond man was looking directly at him for the first time during the whole transaction.

And there it was still, the connection—at least a tingling echo of it, distinctive and undeniable. Except that Laurent had denied it once already.

"I knew you'd come back," Damen said.

Laurent glared at him with all the cold, beautiful fury of a winter storm. Damen tried not to be uncomfortably aware that he was only wearing a loincloth, his muscles oiled to shining for the auction. He opened his mouth to speak again—and was cut off by Laurent grabbing his wrist and clicking something over it. A plain, heavy gold bracelet. Something about the shape of it was odd for a bracelet; he shook it instinctively, trying to get it more comfortable.

"It was supposed to be a collar," Laurent snapped. "Because you were supposed to be a _child_."

"What?" Damen said, utterly confused, but Laurent was already walking away. He snapped his fingers when Damen did not immediately follow, as if calling a dog. It was all Damen could do not to punch him in the teeth as he followed him away from the slave pens.

 

Laurent led him to a group of uneven apartments carved from native stone—a neighborhood for poor laborers and freed slaves, not at all where Damen expected him to be staying—and into the home of a woman named Shmi Skywalker, weary-faced and kind-eyed, who was apparently renting him a room.

"You could buy this entire building with the jewels on your coat," Damen said, "so why are you sleeping in the storage room of a freedwoman who, by the way, is now disappointed and appalled at you for buying a slave?"

"I wanted nothing traceable." Laurent pulled him through the living quarters and out a door onto a tiny, cup-shaped balcony where laundry flapped on a line. They could hardly both stand on it without touching. "No eavesdroppers. Now explain yourself."

"Me? Explain _what_?"

"The Force was supposed to send me an apprentice."

"Apprentice?" Damen backed up a step, or tried to. "Are you a Jedi?"

Laurent laughed as if Damen had said something genuinely, surprisingly hilarious. "Not exactly," he said, the words punctuated by the searingly familiar _snap-hiss_ of a lightsaber—

—that filled the shady balcony with scarlet light.

"Holy gods." Damen had no idea whether he screamed or whispered the words, all he could think of was getting away, getting away from the _Sith Lord_ that was about to run him through.

"Stop." Sounding irritated, Laurent put out a hand and—stopped Damen, forcibly froze him in the midst of a mad scramble that had already pulled down some of Shmi's laundry. "That was, perhaps, dramatic of me. I mean you no harm. Currently."

"That's a party favor, then?" Damen jerked his chin—the only thing he could move—at the lightsaber.

With a tilt of his head, Laurent conceded the point. He deactivated the saber, and the air was suddenly very still without its deep hum.

Damen shrugged off the traces of Laurent's control of his body. With his initial panic conquered, Damen was conscious of feeling a profound… sadness, horror, disappointment.

"You're a Sith," he said heavily. "Ruled by the Dark Side."

"Ruled by no one," Laurent said, and they both knew it for a lie.

"I thought the Sith were just a legend," Damen said. "A scary story to keep Jedi younglings in line."

Laurent arched an eyebrow. "Oh? What temple were you at?"

"One that couldn't keep me."

Laurent was beginning to look less infuriated and more intrigued by this situation. "Maybe it was supposed to be you after all. If you left the Jedi, you must already know their way isn't right. I can show you the true path to power—"

"Don't embarrass yourself," Damen said. "I didn't want to spend my life digging ditches and pulling weeds for the Order. That doesn't mean I threw aside all notion of goodness and decency. I know what the Sith are about—hatred and violence and selfish hunger for power—and I'm not here for it."

Laurent rolled his eyes. "Jedi propaganda. They had you digging ditches and pulling weeds, you say? Why? Never tell me you weren't strong enough to be a Knight. I can feel the power coming off you like a scent."

He wasn't the only one. On the tiny balcony, no more than arm's length apart with a gritty breeze tossing their hair, it was impossible to escape either the physical or extrasensory proofs of Laurent's presence. Damen was aware all over again of how distractingly beautiful the man was, even with the memory of demonic red light reflecting in his eyes.

The Jedi Order didn't quite require a vow of celibacy, but close enough to it that Damen had factored it into his decision to run away. He wasn't made for a life of austerity and restraint. But, he told himself firmly, he wasn't about to take a tumble with a Sith Lord, either.

"So what was it?" Laurent was saying. "You weren't submissive enough? Had too much temper, too much spirit?"

"Probably all of that," Damen said. "But it didn't matter. They found me too late. I was too old to ever be properly trained as a Knight."

"Four or five, then?" Laurent looked blackly amused. "Jedi elitist arrogance. They could never chance someone with memories of life outside the Order becoming a Master on the Council."

"I was nine. My parents tried to hide me." He swallowed against the the memory of being pulled from his weeping father's arms. "They wouldn't let me stay with my family, but they didn't really want me in the Order, either. I was assigned to the Agricultural Corp, for lack of any aptitude elsewhere." He could feel the old anger bubbling up inside him—torn away from his family, away from the bright future and inheritance his father had worked hard to give him, away from the chance to have love and a family of his own someday, to spend his life _grubbing for crops in the dirt?_ It might, might have been worth it to be a Jedi Knight, out saving the galaxy, but for the Agricultural Corp? No.

"Good," Laurent murmured, smiling with his eyes dropping half-closed. "A very fine rage, there. We can do a lot with that."

The chilling effect was immediate. Damen knew several methods for controlling and letting go of his emotions, but he needed none of them when a Sith Lord was praising his rage.

He felt again that deep, devastating sorrow that Laurent, who almost visibly pulsed with potential, whose soul was somehow connected to Damen's, had this darkness inside him—this belief that anger and hatred were better than kindness and love, that Light was weak and Dark was strong and that made the Dark better.

"I will not be your apprentice, Laurent," he said. "I'll die first. It's that simple."

Laurent sighed. "This is why I wanted a child. Someone without preconceptions that I could teach, guide—"

"Someone helpless that you could brainwash."

"Someone who needed me!" Laurent snapped, and then flushed, as if he'd revealed too much. He turned his gaze down into the empty courtyard below, sand-colored stone under merciless sun, as if that were more interesting than their conversation. "A child who regarded me as their rescuer would make a more loyal apprentice."

"True," Damen said slowly, "but that's not why you wanted a child. You wanted someone you wouldn't have to guard against, someone you could trust and take care of and maybe even dare to love."

The look Laurent leveled at him was dark with hatred.

"None of that applies to me," Damen said evenly. "I'll never be what you want. You might as well let me go."

"You know too much for me to let you go."

"And who would I tell, the Jedi? The ones I've been hiding from for ten years? You've done me no harm, Laurent, and I'll do you none in return, especially if you free me. I won't return betrayal for kindness, even to a Sith."

Laurent eyed him consideringly for a long moment, and Damen felt his hopes rise…

"No," Laurent said. "The Force brought us to each other for a reason. You must be intended to help with my mission."

"I'm not going to help accomplish any Sith mission."

"Even eliminating another Sith?"

A startled silence.

"Or are you too much of a pacifist for that?"

"Hardly," Damen said. "But why should I care which Sith defeats another?"

"Darth Rift," said Laurent, "is in the midst of a scheme that, if successful, will be disastrous for the stability of the Republic. The entire government might be overturned."

Damen narrowed his eyes. He did not sense any lie in the words, but… "Why do you care what happens to the Republic?"

Laurent smiled, shrugged. "It would cost me a comfortable situation. I might even be exposed to the Jedi. It's in my best interest to see that the status quo continues." He leaned closer—conspiratorial, charming, seductive. The Dark Side always was. "What do you say, Damen? Help me save the Republic. Then I free you, and we go our separate ways."

"And what will you do with me if I don't help you?"

"Whatever I want," Laurent said with ominous neutrality. "I own you, recall."

Damen grinned, all teeth. "You bought me. No one owns me." Laurent's similar declaration had been bravado; Damen's was truth, and they both knew it. Laurent shifted uncomfortably.

"Give me your hand," Damen said.

Laurent frowned, but obliged, putting his hand in Damen's. Long, pale, smooth fingers, looking deceptively small and harmless in Damen's strong, brown, callused hand. Laurent was wearing a gold bracelet that matched Damen's; he would have to find out exactly what that was about.

Right now he had something else in mind.

Damen threw his entire focus into the Force, into Laurent's presence within it, his intentions and emotions and the shape he made in the world. Was he entirely of the Dark Side, fueled only by hatred and the desire for power?

He wasn't. Damen saw it immediately. Darkness was in him, but it had not taken over. It fought for control of him, competing with logic, compassion, conscience—all those things were still there, still strong. At his core, Laurent did not want to hurt other people. He just wanted to prevent them from hurting him. He'd already been hurt so many times.

Damen saw something else, too, something he didn't know how to interpret. There was… less of Laurent than there ought to be. Living creatures were perpetual fountains of life energy, pouring off them in all directions, bright and hot. Laurent's was lukewarm at best, the light of it steady but faint, barely sustaining itself.

_You're sick_ , Damen thought, dismayed—afraid, even, more than he wanted to admit. But he said nothing. Laurent could not possibly be unaware of it, after all. He'd be feeling the effects with every breath.

Instead, Damen withdrew, pulling his connection to the Force down to its usual level. He tried to let go of Laurent's hand, and found that it didn't work. When had their fingers laced together?

"Well?" Laurent said frostily, displeased at being evaluated. He was not letting go, either.

Damen smiled. "You might be alarmed to hear it, Laurent, but there's good in you. I agree to your deal."


	3. Chapter 3

Damen spent the rest of the day regretting his decision.

It wasn't that Laurent was wrong when he said that the first thing they needed to do was get Damen into decent clothing. Frankly, Damen was grateful for the chance to cover himself, for protection from the sun as well as protection from the wandering hands, tongues and tentacles of people they passed in the markets. But there was no question in his mind that they could have stopped after the third—at most, the fifth—garment stall. There was absolutely no reason for Laurent to not only drag Damen through the entire ramshackle market in Shmi Skywalker's neighborhood, but then to hire a speeder to take them uptown to the only part of Mos Espa that could be remotely described as wealthy—just outside the casinos—and start all over again there.

"Is this really the best you have?" Laurent said to a shopkeeper there, gazing in dissatisfaction at the most expensive garb that had ever touched Damen's skin. "He's largely ornamental, you understand. Which means he needs to look like an _ornament._ Not like a dampness collector or whatever you people do around here."

 _Moisture farmer,_ Damen almost indignantly corrected—but he was probably supposed to be ornamentally silent. Laurent's manner had changed so drastically that he had to be playing some kind of role; Damen supposed it was best to play along, though he wished the man had done him the courtesy of telling him what the object of the game was.

"Sir," said the shopkeeper, a female Twi'lek with quite a lot of sharp teeth in her smile, "I think I have just the thing for you."

The outfit she brought out from the back of the shop had to have been taken off some ridiculous Core lordling who lost everything at the casinos. Few people on Tatooine, even if they could afford them, would have had any use for the impractical garments; Damen wondered how long they had been waiting for a buyer.

"Oh, yes," Laurent said gleefully, "that is _much_ better. Damen, sweetheart, get your delicious booty into that immediately."

Lip curling in disgust, Damen could only cooperate as Laurent and the shopkeeper poured him into the outfit. It was mostly lace, a gradient of sunset colors fading to white at the edges, and had been made for someone smaller than Damen; once on, it left little to the imagination. Ragged ribbons trailed from the shoulders like a cloak gone through a slicer, and a lace hood dripping with crystals promised to obscure his vision without significantly protecting him from the sun. The coup de grace was a huge shoulderpiece, woven of some stiff fabric and holding a bright red sun at its pinnacle, that towered over his head in as _ornamental_ a fashion as anyone could wish.

Laurent clapped his hands in delight at the finished product, and Damen considered throwing him through the wall.

"There, now, I knew I couldn't be the only person, even on such a planet as this, with some consideration for fashion! Where might I go to, do you think, to find like-minded people?"

The shopkeeper ran a tongue over her sharp teeth, considering. "There is a very… fashionable group of younger beings that hangs out in the East Quarter. I think they usually rent out a private room at the Second Sun restaurant."

"Lovely! You've been a great help." Laurent tossed her a tip and led Damen out the door.

As soon as they were out of sight from the shop, Damen stopped and crossed his arms. A group of ragged children running past laughed behind their hands at him.

"Laurent," Damen said. "Explain."

Laurent looked him up and down with an expression of unadulterated delight. "You look like a whore. A pretentious one."

"I thought we were here to hunt a Sith Lord."

"Ah, that." Laurent's smile widened. "Darth Rift's messages to the Senate originated from Mos Espa, that much we could confirm. But, backwater as it is, there are still quite a few people in Mos Espa."

"And?"

"And according to my master, Darth Rift was always a very fashionable man."

 

"We couldn't eat _inside_ the restaurant?" Damen shifted on the half-wall of the garden across the street from Second Sun Casino and Fine Dining. The sun had set hours ago, leaving the casino as a bright oasis in the desert night.

Laurent snorted, taking a bite from one of the fried protein rolls he had bought them. His feet didn't reach the ground, Damen noted with amusement. "That restaurant would be terribly overpriced."

"And you're clearly destitute." Damen looked up and down at Laurent's clothing. They had both changed into less conspicuous garb; Damen into the brown tunic and trousers they'd bought at the very first market stall, Laurent into an outfit of clinging, unornamented black that still managed to scream its quality and expense.

"Yes, well, I just spent four thousand credits on a rather self-important slave," Laurent said.

"You could have got me for a quarter of that if you'd offered when you first saw me. Not my fault you didn't listen to the Force." Damen eyed the half a protein roll Laurent was putting back in its wrapper. "Aren't you going to eat that?"

"Not if I can find anything better."

"Give it to me, then."

"Well, since you asked so politely." Laurent handed it over, and sneered as Damen stuffed the rest of his own roll in his mouth and started unwrapping Laurent's. "Akielon barbarian."

"You got something against Akielons?" Damen said through his full mouth.

"You could say that." Laurent gave him a chilly smile. "My entire family was killed by Akielons when you attempted to invade my planet."

Uncomfortably possible; Damen knew full well that he came from a militaristic world with aspirations of imperialism. Still… "I invaded nothing. I haven't set foot on the planet of Akielos since I was nine years old, except—" Damen cut off, not wanting to revisit that memory. "It's a shame about your family—it is, I don't doubt you'd be a better person if they'd lived—but I had nothing to do with it."

Laurent cocked his head. "If you're not Jedi, and you're not Akielon, then what are you?"

"Hungry, mostly." Damen shoved the entire remaining protein roll in his mouth, until he could barely close his lips, and smiled at Laurent around the mess. Laurent shuddered delicately and turned away.

"So," Damen said, some time later, when he had finished eating. "Your master."

"What?"

"Your master. The one who told you Darth Rift was a fashionable man."

Laurent frowned. "I spoke carelessly. How unlike me."

"I must be rubbing off on you. But the pittin's out of the bag now, so tell me, darling owner—who owns you?"

"I am his apprentice, not his slave."

"Oh? Free to do as you like, then, without his interference? Free to go your own way, if you choose, and he'll just wave goodbye?"

Laurent frowned again, and did not answer.

"The child you wanted to buy, to raise and teach and care for. No, don't try to act cold about it now," Damen said; Laurent had opened his mouth, his face full of disdain, his presence in the Force bulging with lies. "You're trying salvage your dignity, as if being kind to a child were something to be ashamed of. You're proving my point for me, because someone taught you that, and I doubt it was your parents. Is your master too good for kindness? Did he ever care for you the way you would have cared for your apprentice?"

"Why does that matter at all to you?"

"Well, obviously I'm here to save you from the Dark Side."

Laurent laughed with his whole body. It was charming. His words were less so. "You, the slave in chains, the fool who ran from the Jedi to regain your freedom and ended up _here,_ you are here to save _me_."

"Obviously," Damen repeated, keeping his voice level and his face serene instead of kicking Laurent in the shins.

"Or perhaps you are here to learn from me," Laurent said. "The Force is strong with you, but you never fully learned how to use it. I am here to show you true power and save you from a half-life of unfulfilled potential."

Damen rolled his eyes. "Yes, I'm sure the Force brought us together because it wants me to fall to the Dark Side."

Laurent heaved a deep and artificial sigh. "Dark Side, Light Side… These distinctions are of the Jedi, not of the Force. Power is power, strength is strength. The Force is in all life, all energy, all emotion, not just the weak and comfortable ones."

Before Damen could respond to this… unsettling declaration, Laurent's gaze swung suddenly toward the casino, tracking nothing that Damen could see.

"He's moving," Laurent said. "We should get closer."

He took off across the street at a trot, and Damen hurried after, not liking the feeling of hurrying after Laurent and quite certain that Laurent himself was enjoying it.

They slipped into an alley next to the building, shockingly dark as soon as the walls blocked the lights of the casino. And that was where they hit a snag.

Security guards.

Not in the alley itself; above it, on a balcony that overlooked the alley and everything else around it. Alert and armed and armored. Damen accidentally looked one straight in the eye as he jogged into the alley, and froze in place as the man's weapon swung in his direction—not firing, not immediately threatening to, but ready at hand as the guard evaluated the situation. If they ran, the guards would know they were up to something. If they stayed, they might get shot.

"Don't be so shy, darling," said Laurent, his voice suddenly lighthearted and affectionate. And the next thing Damen knew, Laurent was kissing him.

The first shock was mere surprise. The second shock hit an instant later, and it was something else entirely. Something that lit up every single nerve in Damen's body and lifted the hair on the back of his neck. Something that had him backing Laurent up against the nearest wall, kissing him—not frantically, though part of him wanted to, but with breathless caution and delicacy. It was far and away not Damen's first kiss, and yet it felt like something he'd never done before, like something he hadn't been _allowed_ to do before, but now, incredibly, unbelievably, he could. But only if he was careful, only if he was soft and gentle and didn't risk shattering it.

Laurent, who had started the kiss with a cocky expression and his arms thrown carelessly around Damen's neck, had frozen in Damen's embrace almost immediately. For long moments he was as stiff and motionless as a hunted animal. Damen was about to draw back, ask if he was all right, when Laurent finally drew a tiny, trembling breath and leaned into the kiss. His body relaxed against Damen's—not much, but Damen doubted he ever relaxed much—and his mouth softened, moved hesitantly, shy and sweet. Damen did draw back, but only enough to tilt his head the other way and attend to Laurent's lips from another angle, cradling Laurent's face and neck in his wide hands.

"All right, lovebirds, break it up," called a laughing voice from overhead, and Damen remembered with a start where he was. Alley. Casino. Why were they here again?

Laurent swallowed, swaying a bit in Damen's arms, then tipped his head back to smile up at the guard. "Aw, give a man some privacy!"

"It is exactly my job to ­ _not_ do that, I'm afraid," the guard replied. "Run along now."

Of course. This was why Laurent had kissed him—giving them a cover, a reason to be ducking into a dark alley that wouldn't alarm the guards. Damen supposed he could have been disappointed or offended by that realization. Instead he was impressed that Laurent was so clever.

"Come along, then, you big lug," Laurent said with a sigh, plastered to Damen's side as he steered him back up the alleyway. Damen could feel him still trembling, and that was the other reason he couldn't feel disappointed at the way this had gone.

"Rift is on the move," Laurent murmured as soon as they were out of earshot from the guards. "We need a vantage point. He can't be allowed to see us."

"Up there?" Damen suggested, pointing at the roof of a nearby restaurant—its windows dark, all its potted plants withered to dead stalks. Abandoned.

"That'll do," Laurent said.

They circled around to the back of the empty restaurant, looking for some way up the adobe walls. When they found nothing, Laurent shrugged and leaped, even managing a flip at the top before landing on the roof.

Show off. Like Damen hadn't been doing Force-assisted jumps before he was ten years old. He flipped over Laurent's head and landed, silent as a cat, with their chests nearly brushing.

Laurent stared at him for a moment, his expression somewhere between offended and awed, before he snorted and turned away to crouch at the edge of the roof.

Damen rolled his eyes. "So what exactly is the plan? Wait until Rift is alone, get the drop on him?"

"Essentially," Laurent said.

"And there'll be one less Sith Lord in the world." He said the words lightly, but his stomach had gone uneasy, confronted with the reality of what he was participating in—a frank and undecorated murder. Even Sith Lords were supposed to have a trial, weren't they? But this one's guilt could not be doubted, when even another Sith considered him too dark and dangerous to live.

"I can feel your squeamishness," Laurent said dryly. "Rest assured, I neither expect nor trust you to participate directly. Simply keep anyone from interfering and don't let him get away. I can do my own dirty work."

"And you can feel where he is?"

"So can you, if you concentrate. He's definitely coming toward the exit now."

Damen narrowed his eyes and let the flashing lights and faint music of the casino go out of focus, trying to sort out the massive tumult of life and emotion inside, looking for—

Oh. Yes, that had to be him. Plenty of beings inside the casino were driven by vileness of one degree or another, and some were bright enough in the Force to indicate sensitivity, but only one had both a Jedi-level talent and a taint of the Dark Side like the reek of rot.

"Don't move," said a female voice behind them, low and intent. "Both of you, put your hands in the air and turn around."

Damen bit back a burst of profanity. Someone was still paying to keep vandals and squatters out of this empty building. They'd both been focused outward, in the direction of the casino, and the security guard, driven only by duty and more annoyed than alarmed by their presence, hadn't pinged as a threat. Unlikely they could talk their way out of this one, but if they were careful maybe they could—

"I said put your hands in the ai—" The guard's words cut off with a gasp and a guttural choking noise.

Damen spun, and found the guard on her knees on the rooftop, clutching at her throat. Beside him, Laurent was standing with his hand outstretched in a tight fist.

The surge of Dark Side power seared across Damen's senses. He scrambled to his feet and grabbed Laurent's wrist, pulling him away from the guard.

"Don't touch me," Laurent snapped, his other hand flicking across Damen's face in a sharp slap.

Damen had been slapped far too many times before to care. "Let her go," he snarled, shaking Laurent by the shoulders. The guard continued to choke and struggle. Damen tightened his grip, lifted Laurent off the rooftop and dangled him over the edge. _"Let her go right now."_

Laurent looked more furious than frightened, but he jerked his head at the guard. She collapsed without a sound.

"She's unconscious," Laurent said quickly. "I swear she's alive."

She was alive; this focused on her, Damen would have felt it if she died. He set Laurent back on his feet and stared at him, feeling sick. "That was a vile thing to do."

Laurent raised his eyebrows. "Sith Lord."

Damen would have liked to say a great deal more, but at that moment, a small group of people came tumbling out the casino's doors on a wave of drunken laughter. Darth Rift was among them.

But which one was he? Damen and Laurent both watched in tense silence as the group—very fashionable indeed, their colorful clothing and elegantly-styled hair (or equivalent appendanges) a strong contrast to the more usual Tatooine homespun and braids—shouted farewells to each other and began to scatter.

"That one," Damen said, pointing at a human man as he pulled a cloak up over dark curls.

"Yes," Laurent said shortly, and Damen wondered if he was annoyed that Damen had spotted him first. It wasn't any surprise; Laurent still stank too strongly of Dark power himself to be very quick at sensing it elsewhere.

They kept to the rooftops, no longer worried about guards as they left the entertainment district—such as it was—and followed the cloaked man through streets of more rundown businesses, and then into a pocket of seedy boardinghouses.

Rift ducked into one of the boardinghouses, and vanished.

Not just from sight—obviously he was inside the building now—but from Damen's Force sense. Where a moment before had been the vibrancy of a life, if one deeply stained by the Dark Side, there was suddenly nothing.

"Is he dead?" Damen blurted, though even as he spoke he knew that couldn't be right. He'd have felt Rift's death as a death, not a sudden nothing.

"He's shielding somehow," Laurent said. "He escaped my master, once upon a time. This must be how. Some kind of self-taught technique or unique natural talent."

"I've never heard of that," Damen said doubtfully. "It could be something in the building materials. I've heard of a few natural ores that can disrupt a Jedi's ability to see past them."

"I don't think that's likely."

"Less likely than some never-before-seen ability to shield himself from the Force?"

"If you're so sure," Laurent said, "you go in the front entrance and see if you can sense him once you're inside. I'm going to find the back door that he's probably escaping through while we argue." He took off into the darkness without a sound.

Damen rolled his eyes, made a rude gesture in the direction Laurent had gone, and made a Force-assisted leap off the roof to land in front of the boardinghouse door.

He could sense other people inside, he realized with chagrin, meaning Laurent was probably right. But it still seemed like a decent plan to have one of them go in the front while the other watched the back. He stepped inside.

The boardinghouse did not have anything so grand as a lobby; the dirty square of tile underfoot barely counted as a foyer, and the reception booth was not only unmanned, but appeared to be used for storage. A staircase spiraled overhead, giving glimpses of doors to, he assumed, rented rooms.

Several floors above, a cloaked figure glanced down at him over the battered railing, froze for an instant, and then began to run.

 _Gotcha._ Damen gathered up the power for another Force-assisted leap—it had been years since he did so much physical manipulation with the Force!—and launched himself up the center of the spiral stair, aiming straight for Darth Rift.

Who met him with a kick to the face that made Damen see stars.

He managed to catch himself on a rail, rather than falling all the way to the bottom, and clung there with his head spinning and his cheekbone screaming in pain. Above him, he could hear movement—a glance upward showed Rift taking a shortcut up the stairs, scurring spider-like up the center of the staircase. It took several seconds for Damen to shake off his disorientation and follow.

By the time he reached the top and climbed through the trapdoor onto the roof, he figured Rift would be long gone. He was deeply annoyed with himself when the man therefore managed to catch him off guard _again_ , grabbing him from behind and pressing a blade to his throat.

"Who sent you?" Rift hissed. "What do you want with me?"

Damen wouldn't have known how to answer that even if he'd wanted to. No one had sent him, and he didn't want anything from Rift. Instead of speaking, he used his superior strength, size and agility—Damen was big, and no one ever expected him to also be fast—to twist out of Rift's grasp. His attempt to turn the tables on the Sith Lord was stymied, unfortunately, by the gaping hole of the trapdoor, which Rift leaped backward over, and kept between them as they circled, the knife still gleaming in his hand. Rift's hood had fallen back in the struggle, and under the desert moonlight Damen could see glossy dark curls and a surprisingly lovely face. Lovely and young; if this man had seen twenty years yet, Damen would eat his hands.

 _"Who sent you?"_ Rift demanded again, his voice strident with… terror, Damen was unsettled to realize. "The Jedi? The Chancellor? Does the Chancellor know I'm here?"

The Chancellor? Did he mean _the_ Chancellor, as in the leader of the Galactic Senate? What could he have to do with this?

"I don't know exactly what you're up to, Sith Lord," Damen said, "but I'm here to make sure you don't succeed."

"Sith Lord?" Rift laughed, the sound high and hysterical. " _Now_ I'm a Sith Lord. It doesn't matter—I've fought too hard to stay alive to go quietly now. You have no idea what you're tangled in, Jedi Knight or hired gun or whatever you are. Do us both a favor and run home before I have to kill you."

He turned to run, but Damen was faster, summoning a cable that snaked across the rooftop. It wrapped around Rift's ankles, and he fell with a cry.

And came up again with a tiny blaster in his hand, red bolts already flying toward Damen's face—

Laurent's lightsaber sang into being as he landed, from nowhere, just in front of Damen. The bright scarlet blade danced a complicated, thrumming pattern, too quick to follow, catching… four of the five bolts. The fifth hit Laurent's shoulder, Damen would have sworn, but Laurent didn't so much as flinch. Then Laurent was darting forward, closing with Rift. He flicked the tip of his lightsaber through the blaster, melting it instantly. Rift pulled the knife out again, sweeping it at Laurent's legs in a move that brought him inside the lightsaber's easy range, and for a moment Laurent was trying to engage one-handed with a knife-wielding enemy without dropping the lightsaber in his other hand.

Damen clenched his fist on empty air and snatched the cable around Rift's ankles, pulling him away from Laurent. Rift yelped and brought his knife down on the cable, slicing himself free. Before Damen could react, he vaulted one-handed over the edge of the building and was gone.

"After him," Laurent barked, his voice raspy and strained. He was on his knees, clutching his shoulder—the one the blaster bolt had hit.

"But you're—"

"We might never find him again if he escapes. Go!"

Damen snarled under his breath and leaped after Rift.

Through twisted lanes and alleys, through tunnels and rooftops, he gave chase—but Rift was a dark and distant figure in the night, one who knew this area, and Damen didn't. When Damen tried to use the Force to keep track of him, he came up against whatever shielding technique the man had used before. Eventually, Damen found himself turning a circle at a dusty intersection, chest heaving and legs burning, with no idea which way Rift had gone, or if he'd even come through this intersection at all.

 _Lost him_. Damen let out a growl of frustration and kicked a rock. Lost himself, for that matter, with very little idea how to find his way back to Laurent…

Was there actually any reason to go back to Laurent?

They'd had a deal, yes. Damen's freedom in exchange for his help against Rift. And they'd had a connection that was as alarming as it was intriguing. But Damen had rested his trust in that connection, his trust in Laurent, on the conviction that there was still good in him, that he could be saved. It was a lot harder to feel that way now, after watching him use the Force to choke the life out of an innocent person just doing their job. And what need had he for a deal, when he was already out of Laurent's control? He could run away right now; before Laurent caught up, he could be back in Mos Eisley, where he had friends and resources. Assuming Laurent bothered to pursue him at all.

Damen's heart was pounding. He could be free. He could make a run for it, right now, and be in charge of his own destiny for the first time in his life.

Which way should he go? He didn't know Mos Espa at all, and if he had, his first instinct would have been to head for the kind of neighborhood Shmi Skywalker lived in, where freed slaves might help hide him. Of course that was far too risky when Laurent was staying there. Maybe he could break into the back of an empty shop to take shelter for the night—

"You wouldn't make it far," drawled a cursedly familiar voice behind him, and Damen spun to see Laurent stepping out of the shadows.

"You gonna chase me? With that shoulder?" Damen sounded more certain than he felt; Laurent was moving smoothly, with no trace of weakness or pain, and he'd certainly caught up to him without issue. In the dark Damen couldn't see the injury, only the hint of a different texture in that area.

"I don't need to," Laurent said, and held up his hand—his wrist, Damen realized, lifted free of his sleeve so that his gold bracelet shone in the moonlight. Damen frowned and touched the matching bracelet on his own wrist.

Laurent smiled. "I can track you. How do you think I found you so quickly?"

"Ah," Damen said, and hooked a thumb under the bracelet. It wasn't very thick or heavy; there was no doubt in his mind he could break it—

"Go ahead." Laurent sounded amused. "Give it your best shot."

Damen pulled, twisted, even struck the bracelet against the corner of the nearest stone building. The material didn't chip, crack or bend in the slightest.

"You won't break it," Laurent said.

"Won't I?" Damen summoned the Force—

—and cried out in pain, his back slamming into the stone wall hard enough to knock the breath from his body.

"Oh, did I mention," said Laurent, "that it delivers a powerful electrical shock if you try to use the Force against it?"

"Funnily enough," Damen wheezed, "you forgot that part."

Laurent smiled sweetly. "My mistake."

Regaining his breath wasn't made easier by the cloud of panic rising in Damen's chest. He had never been anyone's slave, not really, not since the first time he deactivated his locator chip. He'd only been a temporary captive, biding his time between escapes.

"And now, finally, you're afraid," Laurent said. "No, don't suppress it. Don't run from it. Use it. There's more power in your fear than you can imagine—"

"Shut your demonic Sith mouth," Damen said, "or we'll find out whether I can break this bracelet on your teeth."

"Tsk, tsk. So quick to anger," Laurent said. "You're not exactly proving me wrong about your Dark potential. But there's no need for you to be so upset. I'm not letting you escape just yet, but our deal still stands. You help me with Rift, and you get your freedom. If I haven't convinced you to train with me by then, it'll be a loss to us both, but so be it."

Damen took a deep breath, running through an abbreviated version of a Jedi breathing technique to get his frustration and fear under control. If Laurent's word could be trusted, this could be the turning point of his life. If Laurent was lying to keep him docile, well, then when the time came he'd discover how docile Damen wasn't, but it was worth biding his time until that point.

Laurent, he noticed, was touching his shoulder with a distant expression.

"It's late," Damen said, "and we've lost Rift for now. We should get some sleep and decide what we're going to do tomorrow."

"And give him time to go to ground or even get off-world? No. I have ways of finding him. I can only hope he doesn't best you so easily next… time…" Laurent, in the midst of striding impatiently past Damen, seemed to suddenly lose his train of thought. He wavered on his feet for a moment, as if the ground were unsteady. Then fell.

And did not get up.


	4. Chapter 4

Laurent became aware of pain, and tried to get away from it, some faint noise escaping his mouth.

"Shh, shh, sorry," said a warm, low voice, "I didn't realize it was stuck to the wound, sorry." Fingers combed hair back from his face.

Some part of him, muffled and half-conscious, was panicking. He was injured, helpless, in someone else's power. Was his master testing him? He had to fight back, fight to consciousness, fight…

"It's okay," the voice said again, one he trusted for no reason he could recall. The hand stroked his hair again, soothing and soft. "You're going to be all right."

Blackness closed over him again.

 

When Laurent woke again, it took him a moment to figure out where he was—the tiny room he'd rented from Shmi Skywalker, tucked into a pallet on the floor. His shoulder was burning, but in a distant and well-medicated way. He felt cold and weak and dizzy, like a lesser version of one of his sinking spells, but he was thinking clearly again.

"There you are," Damen said, seated on a cushion beside the pallet. "I was starting to think you were gonna be out all night." He held up a handful of black fabric, wiggling his fingers through a ragged hole in it. "You need to send your tailor a thank-you note."

"I send him money, which is far more useful." So the energy-absorbent shirt had performed as intended; otherwise he'd be lucky to still _have_ a shoulder, taking a hit at such close range. It rankled that he'd been sloppy enough to get hit; he'd been distracted by the need to deflect the blaster bolts away from himself without sending them into Damen.

Damen, who had carried him home and tended his wound. Laurent's face burned to think of himself cradled in Damen's giant arms like some helpless doll.

It was almost as bad as remembering how he'd melted into those arms in the alleyway, caught completely off guard by his own reaction—which had been pure curiosity, he told himself. The kiss was only a cover and had worked exactly as intended, he had just jumped into it without any idea what it would feel like, so he'd been startled and curious and—and that was all.

And now he'd been staring at Damen for far too long. He looked quickly away, but Damen hadn't noticed anyway, too busy examining the shirt.

Damen had his shirt, which meant—

Yes, there was cool air against his chest, bare but for a bandage gleaming white on his shoulder. Laurent pulled the blanket up higher, telling himself the heat in his cheeks was fury at being exposed, not embarrassment.

"I'm not a doctor," Damen said, turning to look at him now, "and neither is Shmi, but to us the burn looks like it's not too bad. In fact, it looks better than it has any right to, no matter how much the shirt absorbed. It looks half-healed. I'm guessing you tried some kind of Force trick?" He seemed to take Laurent's silence as an admission, which it was. "That's probably why you passed out, then."

"What do you mean?"

"You were borrowing against your own life energy, but there wasn't enough of it left to do that. You're lucky, you could just as easily have killed yourself."

"What…" Laurent's mouth had gone dry; he tried again. "What do you mean, there wasn't enough of it left?"

Damen frowned at him, and spoke too gently. "Laurent, are you somehow not aware of the shape you're in? Your Force presence is pathetic. If the average person is a lantern, and the average Force-user is a bonfire, you're… a candle, at best."

 _So easily blown out_. Laurent was conscious of tightening his fist in the blanket until the fibers creaked. He told himself it was the strength of his grip that was making the rest of him shake. "I didn't realize."

"But you can't be that badly off and not feel it! Haven't you noticed anything? Weakness, hunger, fatigue?"

 _Dizziness and pervasive cold, too, don't forget those_. "Only in spells," he said, the words coming out not much above a whisper, and he hated discussing this vulnerability with Damen—but there was no point hiding it; Damen already knew. "I went to a doctor, but he didn't find anything wrong."

"How long has this been happening?"

Laurent tried to remember. There had been so many brief incidents, mere moments, so far apart that he dismissed and forgot them until the next one happened. "A long time," he said. "But they've been getting worse the last year or so."

Why had he disregarded something so obviously abnormal for so long?

Damen's raised eyebrows implied he was thinking something similar, but he offered no criticism, saying only, "Will you be up to going after Rift again in the morning?"

"I'm sure I'll be fine with some rest." Laurent sagged against his pillows, letting his eyes drift closed.

Damen didn't take the hint. "You said you had a way of finding him, despite whatever shielding technique he's using. I don't know how many Force tricks you can afford to play in your condition."

"Ah, that." Laurent reached into his trouser pocket—Damen hadn't removed _those_ at least—and pulled out a little silver remote. "Nothing so dramatic, I'm afraid," though he'd fully intended to milk it for effect. "I just managed to get a tracker onto Rift while we were fighting." He pressed a button, and a hologram rose from the remote, resolving into a map of Mos Espa. A blinking light hovered over a half-demolished building in the eastern sector.

Damen laughed, a surprisingly appealing sound. "Sneaky."

"That's what I'm best at."

"Mm. Yet choking an innocent security guard is more of a brute-force tactic, wouldn't you say?"

It was, and rather more extreme than Laurent would usually have acted. The… incident in the alleyway had badly unsettled him, and all his confused emotions had gotten turned in the guard's direction. Laurent was hardly going to admit as much to Damen. "We all have our moments," he said instead. "It hardly matters, there was no harm done in the end."

"Because I was there."

"Because you were there." Laurent found himself looking at Damen too long again, with Damen looking back this time, that obnoxious and inexplicable Force connection between them tingling as if to make sure Laurent didn't forget about it.

A tap sounded at the door to the tiny room, and Shmi entered without waiting for an answer, a steaming bowl in each hand.

"Oh, good, you are awake!" she said in her sweet-sounding accent. "You both need to eat, I think, but especially you, Laurent. This is nothing fancy, but it will give you strength." She crouched and set the bowls down between Damen and Laurent.

"It smells amazing, Mistress Skywalker," Damen said. "We're very grateful."

"Mistress!" She snorted, tousling Damen's dark curls. "None of that. 'Shmi' will be fine."

"Thank you, Shmi."

The bowls held some sort of thick soup; Laurent was afraid to inquire what it was made of, but it did smell amazing. He eased himself up into a sitting position, hissing at the pain in his shoulder.

"Here." Damen arranged a pillow behind his back, and handed him one of the bowls of soup.

The bowl was uncomfortably hot against Laurent's lap, but trying to hold it hurt his shoulder too badly. Even holding a spoon on that side proved impossible, and trying to use the other—his non-dominant hand—only made him spill down his front. He gasped as hot soup trickled down his bare chest.

"Here." Damen plucked the bowl out of his lap, and for an appalling moment Laurent thought he was going to try to spoon-feed him like an infant. Instead, Damen tossed back the last swallow of some drink he'd had in a clay cup, and filled the cup with soup. "Try that."

The cup was easier to handle than a spoon; Laurent was able to raise it to his lips and sip. The soup tasted even better than it smelled.

Damen turned his attention to his own bowl, and they ate a while in silence.

"You didn't have to help me," Laurent said at last.

"Yeah, yeah, you're a mighty and powerful Sith. But it's a crime to wear good food instead of eating it."

"No, I mean… you could have left me. You could have slit my throat or cut off my arm," he shook the bracelet, "and made a run for it."

Damen looked insulted. "Like I said before, I didn't give up being a decent person when I left the Jedi."

"And that's gotten you so far in life."

"Fortunately for you." Damen raised an eyebrow.

"I'm…" Laurent took a breath, tried to organize words through his irritation. "I'm trying to give you helpful advice. A warning that I'm not going to return any favors you do me. You need to look out for yourself."

Damen shrugged. "I do, and I will. But I don't do the right thing because I think it'll get me something later. You should try it sometime—do some good deeds for their own sake, see how it feels."

"Warning you first," Laurent said, "is my version of a good deed."

He glared at Damen, who glared back. And then someone in the apartment upstairs dropped something heavy, and Laurent jumped, spilling hot soup down his chest.

A very bad moment followed, in which Laurent's instinctive flinch from the soup caused a surge of pain in his shoulder, which caused him to drop the soup entirely—but Damen caught it before it hit Laurent's lap, and moved in to clean up the spill with the outer layer of his own desert robes.

Laurent's breath stopped in his throat at the sudden nearness. What had happened in the alley seemed to sit in the room with them, a presence that watched with interest as Damen's hand, behind a thin barrier of cloth, slid across Laurent's bare skin, his head bent close so that his breath brushed Laurent's shoulder, his hair close enough for Laurent's lips to touch if he tried, if he moved the slightest bit.

Laurent had never kissed anyone before tonight. It had never occurred to him to try. Desires of that sort came to him rarely, a brief and sudden scorch of the senses, unpleasant in that there was no convenient way to satisfy them. No particular person he had ever wanted.

Until now.

"Now I'm going to smell like soup all night," Damen grumbled as he straightened, only to find Laurent apparently closer than he'd expected. He froze, the tip of his nose nearly touching Laurent's.

"Soup smells good," Laurent said, which was absolutely inane.

Damen didn't reply. He wasn't looking Laurent in the eye. He was looking at Laurent's mouth.

Shmi tapped on the door and poked her head inside.

"Damen, your bed is ready whenever you are."

Damen shot to his feet without looking at Laurent. "Thank you, Shmi."

"What bed?" Laurent asked.

"Shmi's being kind enough to let me sleep on her couch," Damen said, "despite the fact that you didn't pay for parlor access."

"Parlor, ha," Shmi said. "Sitting room, at best."

"Did you intend me to sleep somewhere else?" Damen said, looking pointedly around the tiny room that wouldn't have held half of a second pallet. "Master?"

"Certainly not," Laurent said wearily. "Thank you, Shmi, for providing your couch. I'll make your generosity worthwhile."

"If you live," Shmi said serenely.

"Goodnight, Laurent," Damen said, halfway out the door. "Do you need anything before I go to bed?"

"No," Laurent said. "I don't need anything from you."

***

"Damen, wake up. We have to go. Now."

Damen groaned, trying to convince his eyes to open. "What? Why?"

"Because Darth Rift has moved. He's at the spaceport."

That cleared the sleep from Damen's mind. He sat up, uncurling his body from the clutches of Shmi's too-small couch. Laurent stood over him, wearing black again, with a shimmering high-collared blue jacket hiding the blaster hole. He held out the tracker's hologram, where Rift's blinking light was at the outskirts of Mos Espa spaceport and moving fast.

The sky outside Shmi's windows held barely any light at all, and there certainly wasn't time for breakfast. For this alone, Damen thought, he would gladly help kill the guy. Swearing under his breath, Damen threw off his blankets and reached for the homespun robes he'd worn the day before.

Laurent made a choked noise and turned away.

Damen felt a slow smile spreading across his face. "Oh, did you just see a little more Akielon skin than you wanted to see? Or is that the opposite of the problem?"

"The only thing bigger than your ego is your barbarian biceps," Laurent said frostily. "You're like an animal. Every time I think I've exaggerated the sheer _size_ of you in my mind, you prove me wrong."

"Oh? Spend a lot of time thinking about how big I am, do you?"

Some kind of bell sounded from outside.

"Our ride to the spaceport," Laurent said. "Come along, or don't, but I'm not waiting."

 

Their ride was an unlicensed speeder-cab, and Laurent must have paid double or even triple to have him drive straight to the spaceport without picking anyone else up along the way. Though there weren't many people out anyway; not only was it curse-the-gods early, but a smudge on the horizon and a certain edge to the breeze told Damen there was a sandstorm brewing. At least the wind provided enough cover for them to speak without the driver hearing.

"Take this," Laurent said, pressing a blaster pistol into Damen's hand.

Damen blinked at it in alarm. "Where did you even get that?"

Laurent bared his teeth. "Take it. I don't want you guarding my back with nothing but your muscles to recommend you."

Damen would have liked to snarl at him, but Rift had gotten the better of him twice yesterday, so he really didn't have a leg to stand on. He started checking over the blaster, familiarizing himself with it. He had little experience with blasters. Masters didn't arm their slaves, as a rule. "Don't suppose you'd consider loaning me that lightsaber instead?"

Laurent arched an eyebrow. "You would consider using the tainted weapon of a Sith?"

"Tainted or not, I'm sure it stabs people pretty effectively."

"What happened to your own lightsaber, I wonder? Or weren't you old enough to have one, when you ran away?"

"I had one." Damen scowled and tucked the blaster into a pocket.

"Where is it?" Laurent pressed when Damen did not continue.

"On Akielos. Or—probably nowhere, now. My brother would have destroyed it."

Laurent frowned at this. "But you left Akielos when you were nine, when the Jedi took you away…?"

"What's the plan when we get to the spaceport? We'll be there soon."

Laurent looked at him narrowly, but allowed the change in subject. "First priority is to keep Rift from getting off world, second priority is to apprehend him."

Damen thought about Rift's youth, his fear, his hysterical laughter when called a Sith. "What exactly was it you said his plan was, if we didn't stop him? The great and noble reason he has to die?"

"Not here," Laurent said sharply, and Damen couldn't even protest; they were coming up on the spaceport, and the speeder was slowing enough that the driver might hear them.

Laurent called up the tracking hologram again. "That way," he told the driver. "Docking Bay 12. And step on it."

The driver grumbled in another language and obeyed, darting between buildings, vehicles, and the gaping round holes of the various docking bays. Full dawn was on them now, and traffic was picking up. Behind them, a freighter roared as it rose from its docking bay and shot into the sky.

"This is close enough," Laurent said as they approached Bay 12, and barely let the speeder slow down before leaping out of it. Damen hurried to follow.

Docking Bay 12 held a Skyspirit-class Courier ship that was clearly preparing for takeoff, its engines warm and rumbling. The boarding ramp was down, and toward it three figures were moving—all cloaked and hooded, one in black and two in brown.

 _Wait,_ Damen thought, his stomach clenching in recognition that hadn't caught up with his brain yet. _Wait._

"Laurent," he said, but Laurent was already leaping down into the bay, his lightsaber thrumming to life.

And two blue lightsabers rose to meet it, as two Jedi Knights cast off their brown robes and prepared to battle.


	5. Chapter 5

Damen stood in frozen horror, watching Laurent fight the two shocked-looking Jedi. What were Jedi doing here? Had they, too, come to stop Rift? Rift himself had mentioned the Jedi as a candidate for who had "sent" Damen—but these Jedi were not capturing Rift. He had been walking with them freely, unrestrained and even a step behind them. And now, as the three lightsabers circled and clashed, one of the Jedi shouted over his shoulder for Rift to run for the ship.

The Jedi were protecting Rift, whom a Sith Lord had just dropped out of the sky intent on killing. Damen had known he was in grey territory, working with Laurent, but this was… Laurent could only be the villain of this piece.

Furthermore, he realized in horror, he _knew_ one of the Jedi down there. Master Touars, considerably more grey than he'd been last time Damen saw him, but his face was unmistakable. Grouchy old Touars, brusque and humorless and a bit of a rules-fanatic; he wouldn't be operating without orders. So whatever this mission was, this Darth-Rift-protecting mission, it was sanctioned by the Jedi Order.

But Rift had almost made it to the ship, and if he escaped, Damen would have no answers and no deal for his freedom. If they could just make everyone hold still a moment, they could talk and figure out what was happening.

Damen leaped down into the docking bay, landing almost directly on top of Rift and tackling him to the ground.

"Let me go!" Rift snarled, thrashing. "You've already lost, I told the Jedi everything!"

"What? Told them what?"

"About the Chancellor! You want to save yourself? Run now and disappear! He won't lift a finger to save you, that's for damn sure, no matter what you've done for him."

Metal groaned and crunched, and Damen turned his head to see Laurent Force-pulling machinery off the wall of the docking bay. The smaller of the two Jedi cried out as the machinery pinned him to the ground.

Touars rushed Laurent while he was distracted, catching him off balance. With two badly-parried swipes of his lightsaber and a kick to the knee, he had Laurent on the ground. The blue lightsaber rose for a final blow.

Damen snatched the blaster from his robes and fired.

Three shots caught Master Touars full in the chest. He tumbled away from Laurent, lightsaber shutting off as it fell from his hand, and lay still. He'd been dead before he hit the sand.

Damen couldn't breathe. His stomach writhed like a live thing. What had he just done?

"Master!" the Jedi under the machinery was screaming, tears in his voice. He sounded much younger than Damen expected. "Master!"

Laurent got to his feet, lightsaber still pointed cautiously at his fallen opponent, then glanced toward Damen and gave him a solemn nod. Acknowledgement, maybe even gratitude. Damen's sick feeling intensified, to be thanked for this, and yet—he could not have watched Laurent die. No part of him could have done that.

But now Laurent was moving toward the young Jedi under the machinery, lightsaber still humming, and Damen wasn't about to watch that, either.

Damen hauled Rift to his feet with an arm around his neck and the blaster digging into his side, but the young man struggled in his grasp with all the vicious strength of desperation, kicking Damen's legs and clawing at his arm. Damen made it a few steps with him, but Laurent was going to reach the Jedi boy first if he had to keep fighting Rift—

Rift twisted his head and bit Damen's cheek. Damen bellowed, threw him off, and ran for Laurent and the boy.

He skidded to a stop in the sand in front of Laurent. "No! Laurent, he's just a child—look, he has a Padawan braid—Don't—"

Laurent sidestepped him and let his lightsaber continue the arc it had started—slicing the machinery at a weak point so that it fell to either side, freeing the boy. Then he pulled the blaster from Damen's hand, toggled it to 'stun,' and—without breaking eye contact with Damen—fired it behind himself at Rift, dropping him in his tracks just before he could leave the docking bay.

Damen managed, with difficulty, to close his mouth.

"Get up, Padawan," Laurent said to the boy, who clumsily did so, still weeping. He was even younger than Damen had feared, twelve at the outside. Tall and husky for his age, which had helped disguise him. "What's your name?"

"Th-Thevenin."

Thevenin was a Veretian name, wasn't it? It was; Damen could tell by the way Laurent's expression shifted.

"What was your mission here, Thevenin?"

"I'm not telling you anything, Dark Sider," the boy said, drawing himself up defiantly. He was shaking.

Wind whipped around them, carrying long ribbons of sand; the storm was coming in fast.

"A Padawan isn't going to know much," Damen said. "He can't hurt us, and by the time anyone from the Order can come help him, we'll be gone."

"I was never going to kill him, so you can stop talking me out of it." Laurent let out an exasperated breath through his nose, and lowered his lightsaber. "Get inside your ship, boy," he said, raising his voice above the fast-rising wind. "Seal it. Stay there until your fellows come for you."

Thevenin nodded and dashed for the ship. He paused at the boarding ramp and looked back at his master's body, agonized. But he went up without trying to go to him, slapping the control to close the ramp before he'd even reached the top.

"Spaceport security is surely on the way," Laurent said.

"It'll be a race between them and the sandstorm, then," Damen said. "And we need to outrun them both." He walked over to Rift's stunned body and hefted it onto his shoulder. "I know where to go. Follow me."

After a long moment, Laurent deactivated his lightsaber and followed.


	6. Chapter 6

The door of the maintenance closet sealed behind them with a slight sucking sound, blocking out klaxons and the hiss of blowing sand.

"How did you do that?" Laurent's voice was loud in the sudden silence of the closet.

"Do what?" Damen shifted, looking for a place to set down the unconscious Rift. The closet was perhaps the size of Shmi Skywalker's spare room, perhaps smaller, crowded with cleaning supplies and broken furniture, and lit only by a tiny amber security light in a top corner.

"How did you open the door? It was locked."

Damen raised an eyebrow at him, hoping he could see it in the dimness, and settled Rift onto the floor behind a row of carpet cleaners. "I used the Force."

"The Force can't talk to computers."

"I didn't talk to anything, I moved a physical mechanism. No difference between that and calling your lightsaber, if you know what mechanism to move."

Laurent cocked his head. "Is that how you keep disabling your locator chips? I heard about your reputation."

How and where had he managed to hear about that? "Nothing so fancy as 'disabling' it, I just smush it into a little smear of parts."

"The brute force solution. Of course."

"I didn't see you objecting to my brute force solution when it saved your skin back there," Damen snapped. He'd been trying not think about it—how if only he'd had time to switch the blaster to stun, or had thought to do that before they ever arrived, a Jedi Knight would still be alive.

"You knew him," Laurent said, watching him intently. "I can feel it."

"We weren't friends and never would have been," Damen said, moving things around much more roughly than necessary, trying to clear a space to sit. "But he was a decent man. He deserved better than this. His Padawan deserved better than watching him die."

"The Padawan's too young for you to know him."

Damen turned and shoved Laurent back a step, bouncing him off the sealed door. "You're keeping track of my social life now? No, I don't know the kid. I don't have to. I know that he was strong enough and lucky enough to be chosen as a Knight's Padawan, and now that Knight—the only parent he'll ever have—is dead and there's no telling what'll happen to him now."

"Is that what happened to you?"

"Oh, no, I never got that far. I told you, I was AgriCorp." A twinge of memory, turning thirteen and losing the last tiny, flickering hope that he might be chosen, despite arriving too old, despite being too rebellious and too worldly…

Laurent was holding his shoulder now. Damen had probably hurt him, bouncing him off the door. He swallowed and turned away.

"And how far," Laurent said, "did you get with AgriCorp?"

Damen beat sand out of his hair. "A year. I gave it a year, and harvest came back around and I still hated everything about it and I was… so tired of it all. I was tired of their rules, tired of their disdain, tired of manual labor and pointless asceticism. I missed my family. My mother died before I was taken, but I missed my father, I missed my brother." He closed his eyes. "Sometimes I still miss my brother. But he hadn't missed me, it turns out. Not even a little."

Laurent's voice was low and shocked. "He sold you."

Damen turned around, forced himself to face Laurent and say it all out loud. "Yes. I knew I could never exactly have my old life back, but my father was a powerful man. I thought he could hide me. But I never got to see my father at all. The first person I found, when I crept back into my old home, was my brother. Who, in my absence, had become heir apparent to everything our father built, and did not want to go back to sharing."

Laurent looked more affected by this than Damen had ever expected. "If I had my brother back again, I could never…" He shook his head, stepping forward to lay a hand on Damen's arm. "When this is over, when—when you're free, I'll help you get off-world, I'll help you get back to your father."

Damen's smile was bleak. "My father's dead. It was in the newsvids a year or so after I got here—he was important enough to get a mention, just a couple of lines." He put a hand over Laurent's hand. "Thank you, though."

Laurent pulled away, as if regretting his moment of softness. "Then again, would you even trust my word on helping you? Since you thought I would casually murder a child."

"Are you…? Your feelings are hurt," Damen realized, and couldn't help a bark of laughter. "You're hurt that I assumed the worst of you. Even though, as you keep pointing out to me, you are a mighty Lord of the Sith, unconstrained by such things as sentiment and decency."

"And as _you_ keep pointing out, I'm—I'm—"

"What?" Damen stepped closer, crowding Laurent a little against the door. "Not actually evil? A good person under the red-lightsaber window dressing, despite your master's efforts to stamp out all the brightness in your soul?"

"That's exactly what he's doing." Rift's voice from behind the carpet cleaners was groggy and slurred. "More literally than you think."

Laurent ducked under Damen's arm and helped Rift sit up. Damen covered him with the blaster—still on stun, he checked.

"You fools have no idea what you're doing. What you've done." Rift coughed wetly and shoved Laurent off of him.

"You're absolutely right," Damen said, and turned the blaster toward Laurent. "Which is why you, Laurent, are going to stand right there against the wall, while I get Darth Rift's version of what's going on here."

Laurent's mouth fell open, but the expression of shock and anger melted quickly into something else—something affectionate and proud, like a parent whose child has finally bested them at a game. "Not quite so trusting after all, are you?"

"Against the wall, Laurent."

Laurent obliged, even crossing his wrists above his head. It was a… distracting pose, especially combined with Laurent's hot-eyed stare. Damen cleared his throat.

"All right, Rift, talk."

"Don't call me that." Rift shifted as far away from Laurent as he could get, still pale and shaky from the stun bolt. "My name is Aimeric."

"So are you a Sith or not, Aimeric?"

Aimeric spat to the side. There was blood in it. "I am not a Sith. I was a Sith apprentice, once."

"Before you threw away your potential out of petty stubbornness," Laurent said.

"Petty stubbornness! Yes, how ridiculously stubborn I was, to insist on remaining alive. What sort of lies did he feed you, to keep you from asking questions? I'm sure he promised you power." Aimeric drew himself up, spread his arms as if showcasing his own gaunt face and trembling limbs. "He promised me power, once, too. Look at me now."

"What's wrong with you?" Damen asked. Spitting blood, stark cheekbones and sunken eyes… Getting stunned didn't cause that.

"What isn't?" Aimeric said. "Name an organ system, I can tell you how fast it's failing. I wonder," he looked at Laurent, "if my early symptoms sound familiar to you. Cold? Dizzy? Tired? Doctor can't find anything wrong?"

Color drained from Laurent's face.

Aimeric smiled. "You're lucky, then. Once the doctor _can_ find anything wrong, it's too late."

"Hey," said Damen, "you're talking to _me_ now, remember? The one with the blaster?"

"I have nothing to fear from you, Akielon," Aimeric sneered. "You've already killed me."

"What?"

"Hmm, yep." Aimeric pressed his fingertips to the pulse in his throat. "The cascade is starting. I've got a little while, still, but there's no stopping it this time. I'm simply not sturdy enough to survive getting stunned anymore." He was leaning very heavily against the wall.

"How did you know?" Laurent said hoarsely. "Why is this happening to you, to me?"

"It's Regence, of course. What else would it be?" He squinted at Laurent. "You're not so shredded up as I was at that stage. Perhaps he's learned to be gentler. But make no mistake, he'll suck you dry in the end. He always does."

Damen could see the damage in Aimeric, now that he looked for it. Aimeric wasn't a dim candle like Laurent; he was producing life energy at the usual rate. But he wasn't holding onto it. His Force presence was so tattered and frayed that it all flowed out of him, away and gone, like a bleeding wound that couldn't be staunched.

"I wasn't the first, either," Aimeric said. "He tried to hide all record of them, but I found out. And ran for my life. I think you must be the first one he's ever voluntarily let grow to adulthood. Gods, are you the nephew?"

Laurent's stricken expression was answer enough.

"He'd been trying to get his hands on you for years," Aimeric said. "I guess he finally succeeded in killing off your parents, hm?"

"My parents were killed in an Akielon raid."

"Oh, I don't doubt it. But who made sure that your parents and the Akielon raid would be in the same place at the same time?"

Laurent had forgotten to keep holding his hands up. He looked like he might forget to keep breathing.

But there were other answers Damen needed from Aimeric, if he really did have such a short expiration date. "Laurent told me you were executing some scheme that could topple the government and cause chaos throughout the Republic."

Aimeric laughed. "Yes, I suppose that's one possible outcome of outing the Supreme Chancellor as a Sith Lord."

Silence in the room. Damen's ears were ringing. He turned on Laurent with the blaster raised. "Your master is the _Chancellor?_ You hoodwinked me into an assassination to protect a Sith Lord and keep him in power as the _Chancellor?"_

Laurent looked, finally, quietly, a little bit afraid. "You were sent to help me," he said. "The Force brought us together for a reason."

_"Not this reason!"_

"The Force brought you together?" Aimeric repeated. "That's sweet."

"Not so far it isn't," they snapped in unison.

"Tell me about the Chancellor," Damen said, still glaring at Laurent.

"He calls himself Darth Regence," Aimeric said. "He has a great many plans for the future of… well, what we now call the Republic. What he has in mind is something more like an empire."

Damen fought to keep his head clear of panic and betrayed rage. "So you contacted the Senate, and the Senate sent the Jedi to investigate your claim. What kind of evidence did you offer them?"

Aimeric grimaced. "Nothing that will help you without me there to corroborate, I'm afraid." He was sliding down the wall now, his voice breathless and weak.

"Why now? Why are you turning him in now?"

Aimeric bared his teeth. "Petty stubbornness." He coughed blood again, and turned to Laurent. "What's your Sith name, then, my pretty replacement? You know mine, it's only fair."

Laurent glanced uncertainly at Damen. "Darth Glaceis."

"Ha. Yeah, you look like a frigid one. I wish you luck, Glaceis, in trying to prove your uncle's a Sith without incriminating yourself. Or do you intend to try? I wouldn't blame you for only trying to save yourself."

"We'll be trying," Damen said, without looking at Laurent.

Aimeric raised an eyebrow. "And where do you come into all this anyway? What are you?"

"Runaway Jedi youngling," Laurent said.

"Oh? Well-grown one."

"That was a long time ago," Damen said.

"And the Force brought you together?" Aimeric was wheezing now, clearly audible throughout the storage closet, and his rictus expression seemed to be a combination of pain and black amusement. "I had one like that, once, after I ran. Jord. Your uncle killed him, trying to get me. You'll want to take better care of yours, it's surprisingly hard to lose them after even a short time together."

He started to lie down on the floor, and Laurent, paying no mind to Damen's blaster, dashed across the closet to snatch him up and slam him against the wall.

"Oh, we're not done with you yet, Rift! What is Regence doing to me? How can I stop it?"

"If I knew how to stop it," Aimeric rasped, clawing at Laurent's hands, "would I be dying… in a closet full of morons?"

"Is he feeding off me somehow? Why?"

"Because he'll die without it!" Aimeric shoved Laurent off him and leaned against the wall, struggling for breath. "He was… injured… not just his body… some kind of Force injury. Gaping wound in his black soul. Fighting a Jedi… he called it a curse once. Has to feed it… always… keep himself alive on others' life force."

"Why me?"

Aimeric coughed until his body spasmed, but spat and seemed to breathe a little better for it, for all that he was still clinging to the wall. "What else is an apprentice for, but to serve the master's needs? The Force-sensitive ones last longer anyway. He can use anyone, but points of similarity seem to help—male, Veretian, Force-strong. I wonder if your shared genes help, too? Maybe one reason you're still alive. He would have needed someone, though, between the time I ran away and getting his hands on you."

"Nicaise," Laurent whispered.

"Who's that?" Damen asked.

Laurent seemed startled to remember Damen was still there. "Servant boy," he said. "He was already working at my uncle's when I arrived there. He sickened and died, no one knew why. All his organs just… failed for no reason."

"A snack," said Aimeric, "to sustain him between meals."

"He was just a child."

"The younger the better. More energy, more resilience. It's getting harder for him to draw from you as you get older, hmm? Causes more damage?"

"The last year or so," Laurent said, and added stiffly, "Maybe more. I don't always remember."

"But it hasn't happened since you left him, right? Since you came here? I think he has to touch you. He can't do it from a distance." Aimeric, swaying on his feet, grabbed Laurent's shirtfront and looked him in the eye. "Don't go back to him. Run."

"No," Laurent said. "I'm not going to run. I'm going to take him down."

Aimeric hissed, eyes lighting up. "You swear?"

"I swear."

"Good. Force be with you." Aimeric released his shirtfront, fell to the floor—and began to seize. Laurent leaped back from the thrashing limbs, and Damen rushed to move things away before Aimeric could hit them.

They waited for him to rouse afterward, but he didn't, really. Only for a moment did his eyes half-open, and he slurred a few words in a confused and wondering tone—"Jord? Oh, Jord, I'm sorry"—and then seized again, briefly. And then was gone.

Damen slid Aimeric's eyes closed and laid him out on the floor with as much dignity as was available in a spaceport maintenance closet. Laurent watched him, looking shaken. It was far from the first death Damen had witnessed; he wondered if Laurent could say the same, however darkly his master had treated him.

"Did you mean what you said, about taking down the Chancellor?"

"Yes," Laurent said. "He killed my family, if Aimeric is to be believed. And he killed Nicaise."

"This Nicaise, you two were friends?"

"Nicaise was an insufferable brat," Laurent said, "without a drop of sweetness or pity in his soul. So yes, we were friends."

Seeking vengeance wasn't exactly a turn toward the Light, but Damen was still inclined to call it progress, if it meant Laurent rejecting his master.

Outside, the howl of the sandstorm was dying down.

"I have a ship," Laurent said. "Passenger liners would only take me as far as Naboo, so I have a rental in Docking Bay 64. We have to get to it before security can establish my identity and lock it down."

Damen looked down at Aimeric. "I guess we have to leave him here. One of his fashionable friends might claim the body."

"Nothing we can do for him either way." Laurent's voice was brisk, but he stepped far out of his way to avoid the body as he moved toward the door.

Damen caught his wrist and pulled him gently closer. "You won't end up like him. You're not too far gone to recover. You're going to be all right."

"I know," Laurent said dismissively, as if Damen were being silly. But he did not pull away, or shake off the hand on his wrist.

"Once we make it to your ship," Damen said, "we could set a course for Akielos; perhaps some friends of my father's could shelter us until—"

"No, we set course for Coruscant."

"You're going _back_ to him? That's far too dangerous, every time he draws from you he does more damage!"

Laurent put a hand to Damen's mouth, stopping him instantly in surprise. "We can argue about this once we reach the ship and get off-world. Our best chance is to run for it now, with the sandstorm ending. Remember in case we get separated—Docking Bay 64."

Damen wondered if it was the right number, or if Laurent would really wait for him if he reached the ship first. Well, even if Laurent left without him, he'd be better off than when Laurent arrived.

Laurent's fingertips were still on his lips. For a second neither of them spoke.

Laurent was not going to leave him.

"Ready?" Damen said, and unlocked the door.

 

They hadn't made it fifty steps from the closet before a Wookiee in a security uniform came around a corner, gave an ululating roar, and opened fire on them.

They got separated somewhere between Bays 33 and 40, when Laurent climbed into a ceiling duct and Damen didn't have time to follow him. Guards chased Damen out of the comfortable subterranean walkways and into the bright public areas, where he found no crowds to hide in; the entire spaceport had been put into some form of lockdown. Not that shocking, he supposed, after the murder of a Jedi Knight. Though it was tempting to think they should have stayed in their closet, he had no doubt the port would have been systematically searched eventually.

He made security earn it, he could comfort himself with that much. He made it all the way to Bay 60 before they threw enough sheer numbers at him to take him down. Even under a pile of uniforms, he didn't stop kicking and biting until the guard commander held a blaster to his temple and informed him it was _not_ on stun.

"Cuff him," he said, and Damen felt the tingle of shock-cuffs settle around his wrists, behind his back. Physically speaking, he could certainly break the cuffs—but any attempt at that would set off an electric shock, not unlike the bracelet Laurent had so kindly given him. He was in a mess now.

"I saw you on the auction block, boy," said the guard commander, flipping Damen onto his back with his foot. "I thought then that you looked like trouble. Now you've killed a Jedi Knight. You're gonna bring the whole Order down on us, howling for your blood. I'll try to make sure you have enough left to give them."

The first kick caught him by surprise, and he cried out. He tried to curl up against the ones that followed, protect his organs. Rage burned under his skin, so hot he wondered how it didn't reduce his attackers to ash—and it was many attackers now, all the nearest guards following their commander's lead. They knew they could do whatever they wanted with him, a slave, guilty of a crime and abandoned by his master. He had no rights and nowhere to turn for help.

The Force could help him. With the Force behind him, within him, he could tear his way through these men like tissue paper. He knew that with the certainty of gravity. He also knew he couldn't do it now, in panic and rage, without falling utterly to the Dark Side.

But not everyone, Damen thought as the _snap-hiss_ of a lightsaber cut through the sounds of kicking and grunting, considered that a problem.

Laurent's scream as he began carving his way through security guards was hardly human, and not a one of them stood up against it. They scattered with screams of their own, firing their blasters haphazardly. A few found cover and began to fire with more intent, bolts that Laurent deflected back at them with contemptuous ease.

Damen hesitated, unsure whether to get up, and in that moment the guard commander snatched him up by his collar and dug a blaster into his cheekbone.

"Is this what you came for?" he said, and Laurent's gaze snapped toward them.

Damen recoiled in shock, and felt the guard commander do the same, because Laurent's eyes were _wrong._ The galaxy was full of different races and species, but a perfectly human face in which the eyes were ember-yellow, ringed in red and fire-bright, was nothing Damen had ever seen.

"Surrender now," the commander said, recovering, "or your little pet here gets a quick exit."

That was when Damen shoved Force energy at his gold bracelet, which responded, as it had last time, with a surge of electricity. Enough to spill over onto the commander. Enough to blast them away from each other. Enough, even, to fry the shock-cuffs, which came apart easily as Damen picked himself up off the sand and turned around.

Laurent had the guard commander on his back on the ground, screaming as Laurent dragged the lightsaber slowly through his legs. A couple of the other guards tried to charge him; Laurent threw them back with a wave of his hand, hardly looking up.

"Laurent," Damen said, approaching slowly.

Laurent finished one leg and started on the other. "He doesn't get to treat you that way," he said, voice even but raspy, as if he would really rather be screaming.

"And you've stopped him. I'm grateful." Damen stepped closer, put a hand on Laurent's wrist, halting the lightsaber in its path. "That's enough."

Laurent looked sideways at him, yellow eyes writhing. "You would defend this creature?"

"I don't give a damn about this creature. I give a damn about you."

"I know. You carried me home when you could have run. You don't want me to go back to my uncle. That's why no one gets to hurt you." Was the yellow fading a little?

"I don't want you to be hurt either," Damen said. "And this is hurting you. Besides," he glanced around uneasily, "we don't have time for it. I'd rather get out of here alive than watch this man suffer. Will you come with me?"

Laurent looked down at the panting, whimpering guard commander, then at Damen. He closed his eyes and took a breath. When he opened them again, they were blue.

"Yes."


	7. Chapter 7

They didn't go to Laurent's ship; there was zero chance they would be allowed to take off during the security lockdown, even if they could escape being identified. Instead, they made for the thickest crowds of downtown Mos Espa, and bought new clothes.

Their new roles were, apparently, a coquettish dancer and his bodyguard. Damen got cheap armor, sadly more showy than useful, but with a sunshaded helmet that would obscure his face. The price of Laurent's jeweled dancing silks made Laurent hiss under his breath, but he'd committed to the character in his conversation with the shop clerk and couldn't back out. He covered his bright hair with a red scarf, matching the scarlet and rubies of the silks.

"You're going to burn in the sun," Damen murmured, amused, as they left the shop.

"We'll be off-world or dead before it can matter much," Laurent said, through teeth gritted in a smile. "That was the last of the money I had easily available, so let's hope I don't have to sell you to buy another ship."

As jokes went, it wasn't amusing, and Damen saw Laurent perceive how badly it had landed. He bit his lip, which was unfairly intriguing, especially in the skin-baring silks.

"To be clear, the ship should be fine," he said, in some version of apology or reassurance. "It's rented under a false identity. I don't expect anyone on Tatooine has the expertise to connect it to me, at least no one who would be working for spaceport security."

"How fortunate for me," Damen said dryly. "I don't want to jinx us, but so far I don't think we're being pursued."

They kept to the crowds for a while, watching keenly for anyone watching _them_ , and finally concluded that they had, in fact, escaped the hunt.

"Let's get off the street," Laurent said, steering them toward a café. "We can get a balcony table and watch from above."

The café was cool and dim, fans sweeping overhead with a constant susurrus that helped keep conversations private. Laurent giggled and preened as he asked for a private, make that a _very_ private table on the balcony. His casual hands on Damen were proprietary in a way that had nothing to do with slavery, and Damen couldn't say he minded, though he was probably blushing inside his sunshade. The host rolled his eyes and seated them as requested, far away from any other occupied tables.

"Order cheaply, darling, all I have is pocket change," Laurent murmured as he sat, at the same time as the host, on Damen's other side, quietly congratulated him on affording someone so obviously expensive.

They'd ordered and been served their cheap drinks before Damen fully realized what their balcony overlooked; the bustling streets in one direction, yes—and the slave pens in the other. He swallowed and looked away.

"Distasteful," Laurent said, "yet somehow appropriate. I have something for you." The dancing silks had come with a matching red handbag, into which Laurent had stuffed his other clothes; he set it on the table now, dug within it, and pulled out a tiny folio of papers.

Frowning, Damen opened it.

_CERTIFICATE OF EMANCIPATION FROM SLAVERY._

"I had everything filled in but the name, before I even arrived here," Laurent said. "For my expected apprentice, you know. Press your thumb to that little tile, and it's done."

"Done?" Damen repeated, stunned. The other tile, the master's tile, built into the little folio, was already filled with a thumbprint.

"Yes. It's supposed to auto-transmit itself into the city records, but I do recommend keeping the papers on your person for a while."

Most freed slaves kept them the rest of their lives, a talisman against returning to their former status. Damen had never really thought he would hold one of these in his own hands. Freedom through escape had been his focus, his hope.

"Well?" Laurent prodded.

Heart pounding, Damen mashed his thumb against the tile. It lit, scanned, beeped. And that quickly, supposedly, he was free.

There was still a gold bracelet on his wrist. Mutely, Damen held it out toward Laurent.

Laurent fiddled with something on his own matching bracelet, and the one on Damen's wrist fell open, clinking against the tabletop. Damen pulled away and left it there.

"It did turn out to be useful to you, didn't it," Laurent said. "I could have arranged the settings so you could do that at will, if I'd known the need would arise. There are a lot of different settings. The lock, the tracking beacon, all of that is optional and can even be made two-way. I'm babbling."

"Yes," Damen said, and wondered _why_ he was babbling.

Laurent drew a steadying breath. "I'm doing this now," he said, "despite the odd timing, because I thought you might like the option of staying here. The planet where you've lived for over a decade. It's not the home I would choose, but you—you choose a lot of things I wouldn't."

"This is not my home," Damen said. _My home is you._ Where had that come from? Damen tried to gather his thoughts, which were bolting away in all directions. Laurent was freeing him. _Had_ freed him. Today Damen had killed a Jedi, learned that the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate was a Sith Lord, and talked Laurent out of torturing a man to death for mistreating him. Him, Damen, whose own brother had sold him into slavery because he was inconvenient—Laurent had cut someone's legs off for him. And now he was free. And it wasn't even late afternoon.

"I can also pay for passage," Laurent said, "to Akielos, or anywhere else you'd like to go. No one owns you. You can go wherever you like."

"I thought you were out of money."

"Easy money," Laurent corrected. "I have other resources." His gaze was intent, emotionless. "Where would you like to go?"

He was doing a very good job of pretending neutrality, Damen thought. Of hiding the roiling distress inside him at the thought of Damen leaving him. Damen appreciated the effort, but it was pointless, when Damen could feel his emotions through the Force like a heartbeat against his skin.

"I figured I'd go to Coruscant," he said, reaching across the table to place his hand on top of Laurent's, "and save the Republic from your evil uncle. Maybe keep you from getting killed along the way."

Laurent looked at him, the edges of a smile leaking through his neutrality, his Force presence shining with joy and relief and the unfamiliar sensation of hope. That inexplicable connection between them, humming always like background noise, seemed louder and stronger for a moment, reminding them of its presence. Their fingers had laced together.

"Now tell me about these two-way tracking settings," Damen said, and picked up his bracelet.

 

When they left the café, holding hands and wearing matching gold bracelets (truly matching this time, both unlocked and set to track the other), they turned toward the slave pens without consulting each other, drawn there by nothing they could explain. Until they saw the little girl.

She looked to be nine or ten years old, dirty and bruised and unkempt, staring sullenly at passersby from the same isolated, extra-secure pen where Damen had been kept. She looked directly at them through the crowd, eyes narrowed, and Damen stopped in his tracks. Laurent, with better self-control, kept walking, tugging Damen along.

"You felt that," Damen said. "I know you did." It wasn't exactly the same bond that had snapped into place between the two of them the moment they saw each other, but it had to be a close cousin. It was a communication from the Force, and not even a subtle one.

"I felt something," Laurent admitted, glancing back over his shoulder at the little girl.

She had stood up and was staring after them, quivering at attention. Damen remembered what it had felt like to be where she was, remembered wanting to shout _Come back here and get me!_

"Hey!" she cried, rattling the bars of her pen. "Who are you? Why do I keep dreaming about you? Get back here!"

That was too much even for Laurent, who let Damen drag them over to the pen. A weary-looking guard eyed them suspiciously, but did not intervene. If the troublesome slave wanted to arrange her own sale, so much the better.

"Dreaming about us?" Laurent asked.

"For days," the girl said. "Every time I close my eyes. You're not usually dressed like this. You have a lightsaber, and you teach me how to use it. And you—" she pointed at Damen "—you pick me up and carry me on your shoulders like my father used to do." She sounded angry, accusing, as if they were lying to her before they'd ever spoken. Her fingers around the bars were white-knuckled.

"I teach you to use a lightsaber, do I?" Laurent said. He was still holding Damen's hand, and Damen fancied he could feel his quickening heartbeat through tight fingers. The girl did have Force talent; it wasn't as obvious as it could have been, repressed by years of mistreatment and grief, but it was there.

"What's your name?" Damen asked.

The girl lifted her chin. "Breteau."

"Breteau? That's a planet's name, not a person's."

"A dead planet," Laurent said.

"It's where I'm from."

"There were no survivors from Breteau."

"There's one."

Considering glares, back and forth. Damen, bizarrely, wanted to laugh. This girl and Laurent were a lot alike. That was going to be both good and bad.

Laurent snapped his fingers at the guard. "I'm buying her. Fetch whoever you need to fetch."

The trader fetched was a fluttering, warty-faced Toydarian, who eyed Laurent's outfit and apparent bodyguard and visibly doubled his asking price. Laurent quickly bargained him down to something more reasonable, but Damen still wondered how he was planning to pay it. He touched a half-conscious hand to the folio of emancipation papers in his pocket; he wasn't available for trade, not ever again.

"Perhaps you need to visit the moneylenders before you make a final offer, eh?" the Toydarian said, twigging to Laurent's hesitation.

"Moneylenders?" Laurent sneered. He held out an arm, presenting his dancing silks with a flourish. "Do I look as if I need a moneylender? How much am I wearing in jewels alone?"

"Eight hundred easily," the Toydarian said with great pleasure.

"And we have just agreed this slave is worth perhaps seven hundred and fifty, yes?" Laurent began skinning out of the silks.

"Laurent," Damen said in alarm.

"What was it you said to me once, darling? 'You could buy this entire building with the jewels on your coat'? Enjoy being proven right." He was causing a stir, looks and murmurs and confused laughter, but remained outwardly indifferent to it. Damen rummaged in the handbag and found that morning's blue jacket, which he threw around Laurent's bare shoulders as he handed the dancing silks, heavy with rubies, over to the stunned Toydarian.

Breteau, it turned out, had injured her leg in an escape attempt the night before. Rather than make her limp along between them, Damen lifted her onto his shoulders as they left.

*

"It's too dangerous for her to come with us just now," Laurent said, standing in Shmi Skywalker's doorway. "We'll be back for her. This is my com number. I'll be able to send money within a couple of days."

Shmi had a hand over her mouth, staring at the little girl. "Come in," she said. "Come in, let me get you something to eat." She ushered Breteau over to her little dining table, not so much ignoring her stiff and prickly demeanor as sweetly accepting it.

They stayed long enough to see the child settled with a meal and some homemade ointment for her leg.

"I don't have the paperwork handy to free you," Laurent said, sparking startled looks from both Breteau and Shmi. "But I can do this much." He pulled out the remote for her locator chip and, with some Force assistance, crushed it into a tiny ball.

Breteau took the little ball, her eyes as wide as planets.

"I always wanted a child," Shmi was saying behind them, setting down a bowl in front of the girl as Damen and Laurent took their leave. "But the Force never blessed me. I think we can do all right together."

"This is good soup," Breteau said.


	8. Chapter 8

That evening, armed with stolen clothes and false identification, Laurent succeeded in getting them to his ship.

"This is a ship?" Damen asked.

"It will get us to Naboo," Laurent said, trying not to let his cheeks color. "That's all I needed and all I got. Why else do you think I was renting a room from Mistress Skywalker instead of sleeping on my ship?"

It was built more on the model of a fighter than a transport or even a courier, and the cockpit wasn't much larger than that of a landspeeder. There was room for a second occupant, but just barely—especially when the occupant was as generously proportioned as Damen. But it was fast, and once they had the great relief of Tatooine in their rear view, it was only a few hours to Naboo, where Laurent already had a berth on a passenger liner back to Coruscant.

He wasn't sure how he expected those few cramped hours to pass, but it was mostly uncertain silence, interspersed with arguments about what they were going to do when they arrived.

"Regence won't suspect anything," Laurent insisted. "There's no reason for him to. Rift was neutralized; even the Jedi he confessed to is dead. I accomplished my mission perfectly."

"He doesn't have to suspect anything. He's been alone for weeks, he's got to be in a bad way. For all you know, his plan is to drain you dry the minute you're back in arm's reach. He may do it even without planning to."

"Fortunately, I'll have you to protect me."

"I'm trying to protect you right now!"

But argument—and conversation in general—were hard to sustain when they could neither see each other (Damen's seat being behind his) nor easily hear each other over the rush of the engines. It was an awkward journey.

Laurent feared he was only going to make things more awkward, when they transferred to the passenger liner. But he had to try.

 

"Laurent," Damen said, stopping in his tracks as he entered the passenger berth ahead of him.

"Out of the doorway, please," Laurent said, pushing ahead.

Damen moved to the side and let Laurent pass to set down his bag. He looked uncertain, disconcerted. This was already not going well.

"They seem to have given us the honeymoon suite," Damen said.

Laurent turned around slowly, his gaze drifting across the room's décor. Only one bed, scattered with flower petals. Scented candles—not real flame, aboard ship, but nicely flickering reproductions. The room was otherwise dim, hiding its shabbiness behind a romantic aura.

"Yes," Laurent said, making certain his voice was calm and level. "Everything looks exactly as I requested."

"Oh," Damen breathed, and everything hung by a thread of silence, of waiting for what he would say next. Laurent had said everything he could, in the only way he could figure out how to say it. He did not know the words for _I want you to touch me again so much I can't breathe_ , or _I think I finally know what 'soulmate' means_ , or _The Force told me to find you and save you but I think I did it backwards. You found me, you saved me, and I'm yours_.

He couldn't say it, but Damen heard it, and Laurent felt him hear it, through the bright and humming bond between them. Damen stepped forward, his eyes soft and wondering and joyful, tipped Laurent's chin up, and kissed him.


End file.
